News

The International

• Directed by Tom Tykwer
• Written by Eric Warren Singer
• Starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts
• Classification: 14A
• 

Even at the best of times, but doubly so in these times, everybody hates the banks. They're your classic cold-blooded villain, at least in theory. In scripted practice, however, it's hard to put a face on corporate evil and harder still to make sense of their nefarious doings. I mean, predatory lending sure sounds like a nasty bit of business, but how in the name of Maynard Keynes did a bunch of leveraged mortgages in one country transform the entire global economy into a house of toppled cards? And if you're having trouble deciphering that little plot turn, don't even think of tackling The International — an action thriller with some decent action and a few thrills, but all embedded in a yarn so hopelessly tangled that even the loose threads have knots.

That's not to deny a strong rooting interest here. Yes, there's a big bad bank, known as the IBBC, to hiss at. Conversely, in Tom Tykwer, there's a kinetically gifted director to cheer for, and, in the likes of Clive Owen and Naomi Watts and Armin Mueller-Stahl, a talented cast to applaud. What's more, making good on the title, the settings bounce breezily from Berlin to New York to Lyons to Madrid to Istanbul, with each location creatively showcased.

Definitely, this is the sort of movie you want to prevail, and when it doesn't, when what first seems like intelligent intricacy ends in bamboozled confusion, all that remains is an acute sense of getting royally ripped off. Call me a whiner, but a studio flick about corporate villainy shouldn't leave the audience feeling like a corporate victim.

Things don't start off that way. Tykwer (who established his bona fides in Run Lola Run, but has shown only flashes of brilliance since) opens with a taut sequence set just outside the recently unveiled Grand Station in downtown Berlin. Here, and throughout, he puts the different cities' varied architecture to splendid thematic effect, as the glass and concrete of the new, all that fake transparency, contrasts with the bricks and mortar of the old, tradition resting on its solid footing.

Far more tenuous, alas, is the connection between our two heroes: Salinger (Owen) is an Interpol agent based in Europe; Eleanor (Watts) is an assistant D.A. out of Manhattan. Go figure, but somehow they've teamed up to investigate the IBBC in Germany, headed by some very mean-minded accountants in pricey suits, guys (Mueller-Stahl among them) whose idea of the bottom line includes employing assassins, laundering mob money, running guns and fomenting armed conflict in countries large and small, the better to profit from the sizable debt that's the inevitable price of waging war.

That's the intricate part. But then the chase is on and, courtesy of Eric Warren Singer's screenplay, so is the confusion. This much at least is clear: With his baggy coat and two-day stubble, Salinger owes a debt himself — to the Columbo school of rumpled detectives. Manfully, he tries to get to the bottom of that dirty bottom line, but the descent proves awfully labyrinthine.

For example, an early twist takes him to Milan, where he witnesses the assassination of an Italian politician cum weapons manufacturer (always an attractive combination). While we're still pondering who pulled that trigger, the plot jets off to New York for a couple of further occurrences: (1) Watts's Eleanor pretty much disappears off the screen, seldom to return; and (2) Mueller-Stahl's banker meets at the Guggenheim with his favourite killer, there to discuss fine art and homicidal mayhem. Cue a terrific action scene, an extended shootout rat-a-tat-tatting along the Guggenheim's famously curved walls. The sequence plays like its own video exhibit, a museum piece in the museum, but there's a teensy problem: Although dripping in style, it's bereft of substance — hey, just who's shooting whom and why?

From there, an already perplexing story goes heavy on ever more perplexing exposition, something about Syrians and Israelis and other Mideastern contenders. Also, oddly enough, it starts doling out fortune-cookie aphorisms like a Chinese head waiter. Such as: "Character is easier kept than recovered." And: "Sometimes a man can meet his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." Fine remarks these, but, as ol' Gertrude Stein once insisted, "Remarks are not literature." Not to mention cinema.

Final stop in Istanbul, where the climax that unfolds on the tiled rooftops of the Grand Bazaar is, well, grandly bizarre. Then, ungrounded in the hard currency of logic, The International collapses under the weight of its far-reaching ambitions. Sound familiar?